PocketSmith

I’m highly inspired by the work of the Y-Combinator, and I think we’ve mentioned a few times how our principles of grassroots web entrepreneurism are derived in part from the essays of Paul Graham and the writings of the boys over at 37 Signals. A couple of months back I met Tim and Pierre-Em for drinks, and through the course of our conversation, we discussed the notion of establishing a network of web entrepreneurs here in Dunedin - and Pierre-Em came up with the name, The Distiller. We then pulled in James and Francois, and the five of us have been quietly working behind the scenes to make this happen. This also gelled very nicely with a conversation between  Julian Cox and I around developing a summer school programme for web entrepreneurs - and so, with some good timing and elbow grease, it all began to come together.

As a tiny new startup, we understand the rigours of making an impact on the world. I believe that the strength of a startup is in part defined by the company it keeps. We’ve had fantastic support from our friends, our users and our community - and we want to perpetuate and accelerate this flow of support and the attitude of sharing amongst other entrepreneurs in our field here in Dunedin. We’re learning a lot through our first venture, and we’re passionate about providing a framework and resources for web startups similar to ours to get from idea to prototype in three months or less, at a low cost.

We’re going to make this happen through The Distiller. Now we’ve got many plans we wish to execute under this umbrella, and relevant partnerships are already being set up - however like with PocketSmith, we needed to validate the initial concept with the market. Which brings us to our first meetup yesterday evening.

Even though we only planned it at the Distiller High Council (you’d better believe it) meeting the Thursday prior, the turnout was much better than anticipated - around 40 people in all! It was really good to meet with the local crowd of young entrepreneurs, developers and designers, all passionate about what they wanted to do, and all enthusiastic about the notion of working together. I started off by explaining who we were and why we were gathered there; the other Distiller co-founders explained their backgrounds; then we opened the floor to all individuals present - and let me tell you this, there’re some great ideas out there just waiting to be built.

The feedback from the individuals present fit our initial assumptions - entrepreneurs were primarily looking for developers to help them bring their projects to fruition; other suggestions included marketing assistance, better alignment with the University and Polytech, connecting with bigger businesses, access to funding, and building a bigger profile for small Dunedin tech startups. All of which are right up our alley!

Thanks to those of you who attended, it was really great meeting you - and thanks for filling out the forms! The “Tell The Distiller about yourself” entries (which required, amongst other things, a drawing of oneself) were surprisingly entertaining. We’ll process them and get the community cranking.

Watch this space, it’s the beginning of great things to come.

Next Distiller Meetup is Thursday, November 13. Hope to see you there!

Tags: dunedin, entrepreneurs, networking, The Distiller

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Startup tips, The Distiller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.